Monday, March 26, 2007

New stuff and an announcement

I spent the past weekend at a retreat where I spent many wonderful hours with good friends and also stitched up a storm. I made a 12" square for the SAQA auction and once I sew a sleeve onto it will be sending it off.

And I quilted for many hours on a piece that I had put together and painted just last week. Unfortunately, I'm having a problem with some of the paint I used, well, rather I'm having a problem with some of the textile medium. It's flaking off. Some of it I can actually just scrape off with my fingernail and it doesn't even leave the slightest impression that it was ever there. This might not be such a problem if the colors were supposed to be subdued and in the background, but this paint was supposed to be the accent. If it all flakes off, there will be no accents.Here you can see in the center how the paint is coming off. It looks interesting but I can't stop the process so eventually it will be mostly gone.

I mixed some more up last night and let it dry and will test it today and if turns out that it's that particular medium, it's going into the trash.

Since I was going to spend my time quilting, I brought all my thread. As you might recall, I just purchased 179 new spools of thread and expanded my storage bins. What I discovered is that thread is heavy and that the tall set of drawers is not only too heavy to carry, it doesn't fit into my car very well. This is a problem I'm going to have to solve before I go on the next retreat and I think the easiest solution is to just get small sets of drawers and have several of them. Without wheels I could probably stack one on top of another.

I thought I had packed for the weekend very thoughtfully but I had forgotten something important: the little box that contains all the feet for my machine. If the free motion quilting foot had been on my machine it wouldn't have been a problem because I could have borrowed a regular foot from one of the 2 other Janome users. But it wasn't, and since everybody else would be using their free motion foot, I was going to be twiddling my thumbs. Luckily I was able to arrange to meet my husband halfway between and he brought me the little box. So I only lost about 90 minutes of sewing time.

And for the announcement: my artist page on Guild.com has gone live and here is the link. They have selected five pieces to offer and here's hoping there is someone out there who is just the perfect person to give one or more of them a home.

Thanks for all the nice compliments! I re-examined the jar of extender. It's by Speedball and it's called Transparent Extender Base and it's for screenprinting. Except nowhere on the jar does it mention that it is intended for use on fabric. So I think this might be where I've gone wrong. Used the wrong product...it's obviously not the same as textile medium.

Regarding getting lots of thread to retreats: I bought two Stanley double-decker toolboxes. They have wheels and an extendable handle like a suitcase. I fill them up with my thread, roll them to the car, hoist them up and I'm off. I can fit a LOT of thread-big cones in the bottom and smaller ones in the tray. I will try to post pics to my blog but, since I can't get at the tool boxes right now (buried in the basement dye studio until construction is done. If you don't see them on my blog by 4/15- remind me!!